Like most of the people I know, I spent at least 60 hours per week staring at text on a monitor. These days, I’m mostly using 24" Dell LCDs–3 at work and 1 at home. They’re nice, but I keep finding myself wishing I had something bigger, with more pixels. Unfortunately, today’s batch of 30" LCDs doesn’t quite cut it–they all require a dual-link DVI connector, and of the 5 devices that I’ve plugged into my LCDs lately, only 1 can drive a 30" screen at full resolution. Half of them won’t even plug in at all. I want something that I can use at a high resolution for computer work, and then fall back to HD or even lower to play games or watch movies.

It looks like Westinghouse is going to announce something cool at CES: a 52" 3840x2160 LCD TV at CES. My math says that the screen will be roughly 45.25"x25.5" at about 84 DPI. That’d make an awesome full-desk monitor, although the DPI’s a bit low and the corners would be difficult to use for anything that you needed to focus clearly on. Since it’s a TV, I can only assume that it’ll have The Mother of All Video Scaling Chips in it, so my Xbox 360 will still work with it, even if it’s only at 720p. Assuming that the computer side is about like the IBM/Viewsonic/Iiyama 3840x2400 displays that were on the market for $7,000 a couple years ago, it’d do around 25 Hz with a single dual-link DVI and 50-60 Hz with 2 dual-link connectors. I could probably live with that. Sure, there are a few shortcomings, but I’m sure I’d find a way to cope if someone felt the need to mail me one.